Pam Tatlow: Yes, we think it is important, but I don’t think it is the only answer. We have made some proposals that all members of the OFS board, for example, should have some knowledge of social mobility, widening participation and student interest.

Pam Tatlow: I think we should be looking at the Bill in a holistic way. There is a real risk that we look at the Bill in terms of a silo—the office for students, and then UK research and innovation. What we have got at the moment through the Higher Education Funding Council for England is some holistic oversight over the whole of the sector, in terms of reporting. Therefore, there are issues around OFS, and some of the hard corners need to be taken off the regulatory framework. We look at the Bill as a whole, because one impacts on the other. Teaching impacts on research and innovation, and vice versa.

Pam Tatlow: There are 120,000 EU students studying in the UK. We have a commitment to access to the student loan system only for this admissions year—that is, for students entering higher education in 2016-17. Ministers are, quite correctly, encouraging us to get on the Brexit bus, if I can put it that way. We are slightly worried that the best might leave before we have got all the commitments that we need in place. I think that my colleagues in Scotland also raised this with the Minister in Scotland. The commitments we need include the commitment to EU student funding beyond this academic year, however it is delivered in each Administration. Of course, there are also fairly major issues about how those students will be classified in the future.
The final point I would raise is that there are universities which are very engaged in structural funds. We talked with one principal last week, and there is now £50 million worth of structural funding in the west of Scotland. It is very important that the Government address these things, and that they are addressed not only in DfE but in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department for International Trade and the Home Department. We need a joined-up approach.

Professor Simon Gaskell: You are absolutely right to be concerned. The assurances that have been given so far are welcome but do not go anywhere near far enough. Producing evidence will be very difficult, because my colleagues and I do not get phone calls saying, “We were going to include you in our research network, but now we are not”—they do not get the phone call. That will be the problem in amassing the evidence.

Alex Proudfoot: Briefly, I think the OFS needs to have a power reserved in order to validate degrees because, unfortunately, the current foundation system in the UK is so broken. That would not be necessary if the autonomous institutions in the UK that currently validate new provision acted as if they had a public interest in diversifying the landscape of higher education and making new provision available to students. Unfortunately, we find that, quite rightly within their own autonomous priorities and strategies, some institutions draw back from validation, leaving institutions and students high and dry. We see institutions blocking new courses from being validated because they compete with one of their own courses or, indeed, one of their own partner’s courses. Unfortunately, we see a very high cost and very limited transparency in the process across the sector.
We are currently doing some work to try to improve the situation, but it is important that the OFS has this as validation of last resort, as Pam referred to it. If nothing else, it should encourage validating institutions to take their responsibility seriously.

Pam Tatlow: The issue here is not that we do not want competition, not that we cannot accept new entrants into the sector, the issue is on what terms and conditions they are allowed to flourish. That is a real challenge for the Committee as it works through the Bill.

Sir Alan Langlands: We have had one example of that and I think it needs to be challenged. The discussions that Ministers have had in Brussels have been helpful in essentially saying, “The law is the law, the rules are the rules, and things continue as they are for now”, and it is down to individual universities to make sure that our partners—

Sir Alan Langlands: No, I do not think we are on our own. I think there has been good co-operation across the sector. There have been good discussions in Brussels, as I say, in very difficult circumstances. I think Ministers are doing their best to reassure but patience will wear thin as times goes on, there is no doubt about that.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: We are broadly supportive of the recognition that the Government are giving to teaching in particular. That is really good, because for a long time the criticism has been that research gets a disproportionality to teaching. I also  particularly like the implicit and explicit recognition of autonomy, as originally proposed by Robins and Deary, the fact that diversity in the sector is lauded and also that dual support is for the first time given real recognition for the work it does in supporting the sector.
The problems we see are brought on a little by Brexit and a little by the fact that the remits of research and teaching are now under two different Secretaries of State, so I would be looking for safeguards regarding the unity we were able to get, and in those safeguards I would be particularly looking at PhD students, because all the expertise for ensuring that there is a research environment will sit within the UKRI sector; it does not exist in the OFS sector, yet we note, for example, that higher degrees, which may be largely research-based, are going to sit with the OFS. There are some musts that need to be introduced in the Bill to ensure that there is absolute co-working between UKRI and the OFS in that area.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz: Briefly, the data has a range of granularity and is invariably collected in this sector with a major contextual element. The sector as a whole is keen that where the data is provided, the pure context, which varies from institution to institution, is provided alongside, with a responsibility on the researchers to take into account all the elements. This is not a simple set of numbers merely to make headlines out of; it is something to be very carefully considered.

Mary Curnock Cook: Honestly, the more data that is published—whether that is about who goes to university, who does not go to university, what qualifications they go with and their retention and success in their studies, which relates to the transparency clause—the more that organisations like UCAS have a much better opportunity to make that information available and accessible to students. A lot of students and the people who advise them think that they have information overload, because there are so many sources of it in the technological age. It is not as simple as just making more and more information available. The transparency duty and the ability of UCAS to make data available to researchers will be helpful overall.